[sacw] Right-Wing Politics, and the Cultures of Cruelty

[Harsh Kapoor]

FYI
Harsh Kapoor
---------------------

Source: AKHBAR March 1999 SPECIAL

Ved Gupta Memorial lecture 1998

Right-Wing Politics, and the Cultures of Cruelty

by Aijaz Ahmad

(We are grateful to the author for the text and to the Democratic Teachers'
Front (DTF) of the University of Delhi for permission to put it on the
net.)

I want to thank you for giving me this opportunity to deliver the Ved Gupta
Memorial Lecture this year. Unfortunately, I never had the privilege of
knowing the late Mr. Gupta. I am nevertheless gratified to be speaking in
the memory of a man who gave so much of his energy and passion to the
building of a culture of broad democratic values, at a time when values of
a democratic culture are under greater assault and stress than ever before.
Later in this lecture, I shall be arguing that the current assault on our
educational and research institutions is designed specifically to permeate
the educated sections of society with politics of hate and cultures of
cruelty in the service of a rightwing project for which the word `fascist'
seems appropriate. I shall be using this word repeatedly throughout this
lecture. So, let me start by reflecting on the meaning and salience of this
word.

There are three perfectly correct but quite distinct ways of using this
word. One is the colloquial one, in which we sometimes use the word
`fascist', when we are righteously angry and when we mean to be abusive,
for any particularly repugnant act of cruelty, violence or repression,
certainly in public life but also in what are generally understood as
personal relations. At the opposite end is the most strictly
accurate usage of the term, whereby, really, only the Mussolini regime in
Italy could be called fascist; Nazis were not, Franco's dictatorship in
Spain was not, and the Sangh parivar evidently is not. But then there is
also a third usage, by no means uncommon or inappropriate, but more supple
and wide-ranging, in which the word `fascism' is used to negotiate a very
complex experience, spanning a whole century and virtually the whole world,
in which a wide range of ideologies, movements and regimes have arisen
which are not exactly the same, so that it becomes irrelevant to speak of a
singular `fascist paradigm' to which all of them correspond, but which are
in some fundamental way of the same design and frequently of the same
inspiration.

It is in this last sense that the origins of fascism are traceable not
merely to Italy after the First World but to France in the last quarter of
the 19th century, and that we speak of the resurgence of fascism across the
whole of Western Europe today, or of the rise to power of the descendants
of fascism in the four main states that have arisen from the ruins of
former Yugoslavia. Also, it is in this sense that I have used the term
clerical-fascist for the Islamic regime in Iran since Khomeini's seizure of
power some two decades ago, or that the Hindutva brand of nationalism
appears to me to be intrinsically fascist in character. The word `fascism'
in this usage is not an exercise in paradigm-building or a particularly
strong mode of denunciation. Rather, it designates certain forms of
politics that have been with us, on the global scale, since roughly the
1880s, which is also the moment of the birth of modern imperialism on the
one hand, and the moment of the emergence of mass working class parties on
the other. The word itself of course came much later, but that this kind of
politics and ideology should arise alongside modern imperialism and the
modern revolutionary movements is by no means a coincidence, just as it is
no coincidence that the RSS was formed roughly at the same time when the
anti-colonial movement first became a mass movement and certain kinds of
working class politics of the Left got going. The sum of ideologies for
which the word `fascist' seems appropriate are ideologies that belong
specifically to the age of imperialism, anti-imperialism and revolutionary
class struggle, and, as I shall argue later, fundamental to these forms of
politics has been the will to fashion an anti-materialist conception of
revolution, anti-liberal conception of nationalism, anti-rationalist
critique of Modernity, anti-humanist assaults on the politics of
liberation, in a rhetoric of "blood and belonging", and in the name of a
glorious past that never was. These are ideologies of a revolutionary age,
pre-emptive and counterrevolutionary ideologies of course, but these too
are dedicated to making their own kind of revolutions-that is, revolutions
of the Far Right. The fundamental premise of my argument today is that
India is at present undergoing a revolutionary process. We do not recognise
it as such because it is a revolution not of the Left but of the Far
Right-of the sort that is currently under way in Algeria, for example.
Whether this revolution shall fail or succeed is far from clear, nor is it
at all clear that even the simple territorial unity of the country shall
survive the fires that this offensive has lit. The cultures of cruelty that
are spreading all around us are a part of this Far Right revolutionary
offensive because values of democratic, secular civility must be made to
crumble from the inside; and that is so because, in the conditions of
electoral and parliamentary democracy prevailing in India today, what the
Far Right visualizes and prepares for is not a frontal seizure of power but
a hurricane from below, carried out by a widespread and pliable mass of the
wretched of this earth led by a well-disciplined counter-revolutionary
elite.

I have written elsewhere, more or less polemically, that every country gets
the fascism that it deserves, by which I simply mean that the specific form
that a fascist movement takes shall always depend on the social physiognomy
of that country: that is to say, the economic, political, philosophical,
aesthetic, religious, cultural and ideological forms that are specific to
that country. India is no exception to this rule, and to identify the forms
specific to our experience we have to look downward and inward. But the
Indian experience cannot be extricated from the experience of the modern
world as a whole-the world that begins, politically speaking, in one sense
with the French Revolution during the last quarter of the 18th century, and
in another sense with the onset of modern imperialism a century later
during the last quarter of the 19th century, and in another sense with the
collapse of communism in the closing decades of the present century. Our
own experiences of colonisation, independence and what we now call
`liberalisation' are a part of this larger story. It is in order to locate
the phenomenon of fascism in this larger story that I have reminded you of
the actual origins of this kind of politics in late nineteenth century. I
should also want to offer a certain principle of periodisation for our
experience of fascism during the present century, which is based on a
contrast that runs as follows. Fascism of course remains a punctual but
subordinate political tendency throughout the whole of the imperialist
period. However, there have been two quite different historical moments
when the epidemic of such movements has become particularly widespread, for
somewhat different structural reasons. Thus, we might say that the fascisms
of the inter-war period corresponded to the crises of accumulation brought
about by the maturing of imperialism itself as it made a fuller transition
from the competitive to the monopoly structure of capital. This is an
explanation that Baran and Sweezy, among others, and Poulantzas in his own
way, have accepted; and I would add that whereas movements of this kind
were particularly strong in the core countries of Europe, their influence
spread through much of the world, from Japan to Iraq, Syria and Lebanon,
and from Argentina to India. By contrast, the end-of-the-century fascisms
of today correspond to the Late Imperial period of full globalisation of
the capitalist mode, in which the mode has provisionally triumphed over
communist states but faces internal crises of stagnation in the core
countries and unmanageable social tensions in the less industrialised
countries, brought about in part by that imperialist globalisation and in
part by the defeat or decay of the socialist, democratic and
secular-nationalist projects within the imperializes countries.

I draw your attention to this principle of periodisation for three reasons.
First, to emphasize that since the fascisms of today belong in an entirely
novel period of modern history they cannot repeat the experience and the
forms of an earlier and very different period. They have to be understood
both in terms of their lineage as well as their particularity. Second, the
characterisation of the later, more contemporary phase helps us understand
a certain reversal, namely that whereas the scale of violence in such
malignant movements has been relatively more manageable for the
constitutional governments of Western Europe, they have erupted with far
greater ferocity in the peripheries of the system where conditions of
crisis are more advanced: especially in some central European and Asian
zones including, notably, India. Whether not Russia will go the way of
Serbia is yet not clear. Third, this sense of the scope of malignancy also
clarifies that what we are dealing with here is not some kind of Indian
exceptionalism but a generalized experience of our time that is taking
specific forms in our own country.

That is the first point: fascism as a generalized tendency throughout the
history of imperialism, but a tendency that takes different forms in
different national conditions, while the history of imperialism itself
needs to be understood in terms of distinct phases and periods within this
larger history. But, then, all fascisms have at their core a pathological
form of nationalism. Indeed, this type of ideology was called `integral
nationalism' in France before it came to be called `fascism' in Italy. This
pathology is as much there in the Hindutva brand of nationalism as in the
National Front in France or the National Alliance in Italy or the sundry
projects of national purification and ethnic cleansing that have been going
on in various parts of the former Yugoslavia, not to speak of the classical
variety in Italy and Germany, from which some of the founders of Hindutva,
such as Savarkar and Moonje, drew so much inspiration. Now, the fact that
fascism itself rests on a pathological variety of nationalism requires that
we reflect on the phenomenon of nationalism itself. Yet, In the
intellectual climate prevailing today, it is very difficult to discuss the
subject of nationalism. There once was a time, in the period of
anti-colonial struggles, when all varieties of nationalism were presumed to
be good. Then, as a certain disillusion with the nationalism of the
national bourgeoisie began to set in, and as anti-rationalist critiques of
Modernity began to be assembled in the metropolitan countries, it
transpired that anti-colonialism was nothing more than the other face of
colonialism itself-a colonial discourse, to be exact. In the Indian
context, it is significant that a quasi-radical indictment of the Nehruvian
model of economic nationalism was forged at exactly the same time when the
Rightwing indictment of Nehruvian secularism was beginning to make inroads
among the haute intelligentsia; later, of course, the two indictments, of
planned development and of secularism, were to converge. Meanwhile, the
high ground of nationalist claim, which had earlier been associated mainly
with national liberation struggles and anti-colonial movements, came to be
occupied increasingly by radicalisms of the Right, more murderous in some
places than others, not just in East and Central Europe after the collapse
of communism there but also in great many places across Asia and Africa,
notably Iran, Afghanistan and India. It was in this larger context that
nationalism-all of it; all varieties of it-fell into terrible disrepute.

This has been very bewildering for someone such as myself who has been
deeply suspicious of the pathologies of fascistic nationalism but who also
believes in at least two other things. The first is that in a backward
capitalist country like India, which is socially more heterogeneous than
any other country on earth, and which is undergoing enormous stresses as it
undertakes very haphazard, very hit-&-miss kind of modernisation of its
anachronistic structures, nationalism is simply a necessary cement if the
country is not to fall apart; if the Left fails to harness this energy and
provide that cement, the Right most assuredly shall. But, then, I also
believe that in an age of imperialism, a Leftist kind of nationalism is an
objective necessity. To the extent that it is the nation-state that
facilitates the imperialist penetrations of the economy and guarantees the
various prevailing regimes of labour, the nation-state remains the
necessary horizon of politics, and it is important that we not concede the
ground of nationalism to the rightwing.

How does one then come to terms with this whole range within nationalism,
from the revolutionary to the pathological, from the democratic to the
fascist. I was saying a bit earlier that if mass politics of the working
class, fascism and modern imperialism are the issue, then perhaps the
1880s, roughly, can be regarded as the point of departure. But if we were
to trace the genealogies of nations and nationalisms, the point of
departure shall have to be moved to a point a century or so earlier, in and
around the French Revolution. It was then that all manner of nationalisms
that are still with us were born. Not all of them are the gift of the
Enlightenment; many are mere pathologies of the Romantic imagination-but it
is then, in that great revolutionary upheaval at the origin of the modern
world, that the fundamental bifurcation takes place.

Here I shall offer you not a periodisation but a typology, necessarily
schematic, not about the history of nationalism but about its ideological
formation. At the most general level, and contrary to what one has learned
in certain kinds of Marxism, it needs to be said that nationalism per se is
not a class ideology and that the political character of any given
nationalism depends on the nature of the power bloc that takes hold of it
and utilises it for its own dominance. As such, there are progressive
nationalisms and retrogressive nationalisms; more frequently, any given
nationalism tends to be progressive and retrogressive at the same time,
with regard to one social reality on the other. An anti-colonial
nationalism is perfectly capable, for example, to accommodate a high degree
of xenophobia or settled prejudices against women. Among the many processes
that have gone into the making of this complex history, I should want to
isolate two conceptual moments that are analytically separable but appear
in real history in varying combinations.

On the one hand, the modern constitutional state that rests upon the idea
of the nation arose initially as a profane civil entity, against religious
authority and monarchical or feudal or even colonial autocracy. In the
conception of the nation that derives from the French `Declaration of Man
and the Citizen' the idea of citizenship is radically separated from race,
religion or any other kind of primordial belonging, and is made much
looser, available to all who are willing to accept the authority of the
nation-state and the rights and obligations that apply to all equally and
universally. The emergence of this conception of the nation marks the
transition from subjection to citizenship, from obligation to rights, and
constitutes a realm of political action and legislative function based on
some modern conception of legitimacy, associated usually with popular
representation. This realm of citizenship is then seen as an active
ingredient in agencies for social change, be it revolutionary or reformist.
>From Hegel to Croce to Gramsci, there is a strong tradition of requiring
from the nation-state that it should punctually act as an ethical,
pedagogical function designed to serve people's needs for reform and
progress in the various social and economic domains. One may designate this
as the Enlightenment conception of the state, in the original sense of a
rationalist project that was often expressed in Idealist terms. Even the
Leninist conception which squarely identifies the revolutionary moment as
the moment of the smashing of the state rests on the notion of the need to
create an alternate form of state, the proletarian state, as the ethical
form for the transition toward a classless society. In none of these
conceptions is the nation-state regarded as the expression of an ethnos, a
condition of the soul, an expression of culture, a matter of religious
identity and primordial belonging. A nation is emphatically not a race.
>From Rousseau and Kant to Lenin, this type of state has been associated
with rational plans for creating the good society, while citizenship in a
nation is seen as transitional toward an eventually universal society. In
Marx, of course, there is a deep distrust of the division of humanity into
nations and states, even though, as the Manifesto emphasized, every
proletariat has to settle accounts, first of all, with its own bourgeoisie.

The other, contrasting moment in the making of modern nations and
nationalisms is descended essentially from that tendency in German Idealism
that is most forcefully represented by Herder and Fichte. Upon re-reading
it recently, I was quite struck by the fact that in A History of Western
Philosophy, a book written as far ago as 1945, Bertrand Russell associates
Fichte with rightwing romanticism on the one hand, and with Nietzsche on
the other, and characterises him as a prophet of what Russell calls
"nationalistic totalitarianism." In this alternative conception, the state
embodies a general will arising not out of a common citizenship but out of
a cultural essence, based on ethnicity, race, religion, language or some
other form of a primordial intimacy specific to an entity that by
definition excludes others. In this conception, there is a sharp
distinction between the national Self and the rest of the world;
citizenship in such a nation is conceived not in terms of expanding toward
a universalist inclusion but in terms of self-definition, enclosure, even
self-purification. This conceptual universe rests, ultimately, on cultural
wars and civilizing missions; and on the obliteration of heterogeneity to
obtain homogeneous nations. More often than not, such conceptions of the
nation have been prone to xenophobia, irrationalism, cultural
differentialism, racism, and relativisms of all sorts.

Between these competing notions of the nation-state I undoubtedly prefer
the universalist and inclusivist conception which rests on the criterion
not of primordial difference but of modern citizenship. Having offered you
so sharp a distinction, however, let me immediately add that this is a
typology, constructed for methodological purposes, not for a strict or
accurate description of the real. These are essentially poles of
attraction, and rare is a nationalism that gravitates only to one pole or
the other. What one needs to grasp, when one is trying to grasp the real,
is the exact combination and the range, because the range within the
practices of most nationalisms tend to be usually very wide. Our historical
experience is that most anti-colonial nationalisms tend to be ideological
hybrids. On the one hand, these are forward-looking movements specifically
of the modern kind, in the sense that their entire ideological articulation
is based on a very modern conception of every people's inherent right to
liberty, collective self-determination and popular sovereignty. This aspect
of anti-colonial movements aligns them with the rationalist and democratic
aspects of the Enlightenment project and the libertarian legacy of the
French Revolution. However, every nationalism of the defeated also has an
inherent potential for revivalist nostalgia and national re-purification,
since foreign rule is experienced ideologically as a violation of the
collective identity, imposition of alien cultural forms, and a fall from a
past greatness. And, to the extent that the privileged intelligentsia,
especially in a caste-ridden society such as India, tends to confuse
culture with religion, the slide from dreams of cultural retrieval to
religious revivalism, and from cultural nationalism to religious
purification and particularity, always lurks as a real potential at the
very heart of anti-colonial nationalisms of the bourgeois and petty
bourgeois strata. The rationalist and the Romantic elements of the
imagination, the traditionalising and the modernizing impulses in projects
of social change, exist simultaneously in any nationalism of the defeated,
and one needs to examine any particular nationalism carefully so as to
determine as to which side within this contradictory unity is dominant.

This makes very problematic the kind of opposition we normally proclaim
between the communal and the secular in India. I am not referring here
simply to those quite numerous individuals, especially among the
professional politicians but also more generally among the urban
sophisticates of the privileged classes, who are secularists one day and
communalist the next. They are in reality neither the one nor the other.
They are rank opportunists, and they often are, in the word that Mussolini
was fond of using for himself, "super-relativists." I mean something much
more complex. On the one hand, the entire history of what we call our
secular nationalism is replete with nostalgic revivalisms and those claims
of cultural particularly which trace themselves back to a Golden Age when
India was pristinely Hindu, undisturbed by Christian and Muslim intrusions;
it is possible to call this nationalism secular, though with much
reservation and difficulty, only because that same formation also had, as a
dominant element within itself, a vision of a modern, post-colonial India
that was culturally diverse, religiously pluralistic, constitutionally
federalist and republican, with extensive guarantees of individual and
collective rights. The formative years of the Republic were undoubtedly
marked by a nationalism which was essentially universalist and inclusive,
hence largely capable of controlling its own impulses toward revivalism. On
the other hand, however, revivalist tendencies were very powerful in their
own right, as organized political forces such as the Hindu Mahasabha and
the RSS, as subordinate ideological formations within the mainly secular
nationalism, and as elements in diverse reform movements, educational
societies, literary and linguistic projects, and so on. In short, then, the
terrain of nationalism in India has always been a contested terrain, over
which the secular and the communal have struggled as opposing forces but
also as adjacent plants growing on the same soil. Just as much secular
nationalism tended to be nostalgic and revivalist in the cultural domain
without becoming politically communal, much of communal politics saw itself
as a redemptive project in pursuit of a primordial essence that was
perceived as the true cement for the national compact. For the communalist,
therefore, it was perfectly possible to see himself as a true nationalist
in so far as he could perceive himself as a crusader on behalf of the
overwhelming numerical majority in the nation. This nationalistic
subjectivity of a communalist I should want to illustrate briefly, before
returning to a more methodical statement a bit later.

Let me suggest to you, more or less provocatively, that when Mr. Advani, at
present our Home Minister, claims that he is a secular man, he is by his
own lights perhaps right; he is not notably devout, except nominally for
purposes of Hindutva mobilizations; there is little reason to believe that
he wishes to impose here in India a theocracy of the type that the Irani
mullahs, or worse still the Afghani Taliban, desire for their respective
countries; and I would tend to think-I don't know for sure, but it is
probably the case-that he is perfectly secular in relation to other Hindus
and perhaps even some non-Hindus of his choice. The problem of his
communalism is pre-eminently a problem of his relationship with the
generality of non-Hindus. Some sources of this problem we can mention, for
illustrative purposes. One is a confusion of categories: he mistakes
religion for culture and culture for nation, hence the further confusion
between private belief and rights of citizenship. Second, he seems to have
a wrong kind of belief in arithmetic. He mistakes citizenship for a
numerical calculation; more must have more rights, fewer can live with
fewer rights. He seems not to understand that in a civilized society the
reverse often has to be the case; a social majority can make do with
general and equal rights alone, whereas it is the social minority that
lives with very real possibilities and fears of infringement and therefore
needs some extra safeguards. And, he believes too much in blood-and in
varieties of blood. The spilling of the blood of non-Muslims leaves him
quite evidently unperturbed; the spilling of the blood of a Hindu fills him
with a very special kind of passion and with great agitations of the soul.
He is obviously very skillful at perpetrating culture wars and he equally
obviously thinks of the RSS as a civilizing mission. Conversions disturb
him because he evidently thinks of religion as a kind of race and religious
conversion as a kind of racial miscegenation, contrary to the purity and
primordiality of belief and belonging. The poorest adivasi, whom the Hindu
caste society has never taken into its own fold, is still a part of this
primordiality and becomes a nominal Hindu, retrospectively, as soon as he
converts to a religion that entered India, in the remote past, from
elsewhere. Like his other colleagues in the RSS, Mr. Advani seems to
believe that the territorial boundary is also the boundary, the permanent
boundary, between the sacred and the profane. This odd identification
between territory, blood and belief is what requires that this defilement
by religious conversion be stopped and undone. The ones who have undertaken
these sacraments of purification, through rituals of fire and murder, are
the heroes of the nation. Thus it is that he can calmly certify the goons
of the Bajrang Dal as true nationalists. I am sure that those goons also
regard Mr. Advani as a great nationalist. The admiration, the
certification, is undoubtedly mutual.

Now, for a secularist such as myself, that kind of judgement is much easier
to make. What is infinitely more difficult to assess is the meandering,
contradictory history of what we call our secular nationalism. I shall come
to the specifics soon, but let me first offer you the proposition that
secularism is a revolutionary ideal and a modern civic virtue. It does not
arise spontaneously out of a traditional society. Most traditional
societies, certainly the settled agrarianate societies, are deeply
hierarchical, tolerant and intolerant at the same time: tolerant of some
differences and intolerant of some others, usually with wide fluctuations,
even though clear and stable lines of demarcation and hierarchy are
attempted all the time. Demarcations between castes, classes and genders,
in the absence of any common conception of juridic equalities, give to such
societies a deeply intolerant character. At their most tolerant, however,
traditional societies practise a kind of benign pluralism among communities
and a kind of benign neglect of a whole range of religious differences
among individuals. This kind of toleration is surely a mode of social
decency, much to be valued but not to be confused with what one could
reasonably call secularism. The fact is worth contemplating that within
Europe itself, from where most of our ideas of constitutional governance
have come, secularism got enshrined as a constitutional obligation in
procedures of governance only in the wake of a massive revolutionary
upheaval in France; and the translation of the formal juridic equality of
denominationally different persons into a substantive social equality is
still very far from having become a finished achievement. Ask any Jew, and
you will find out that living in Europe has been for her a living hell in
the modern as much as in the premodern periods, right up to the end of the
Second World War. Civic equality for European or American Jews is a
phenomenon of only the last half a century, an experience that the
generality of blacks are yet to take for granted in the United States, so
that when a Muslim friend once asked me in what respect the experience of
Muslims in India was really different than that of American blacks, I was
left rather speechless. What I am trying to say is that the struggle to
obtain a society based on civic, secular equalities-let alone a society of
equality in the domain of economic entitlements-requires revolutionary
transformations and has so far been very difficult to obtain.

Now, it is very much a virtue of our constitutional covenant that it is
based on conceptions of radical juridic equalities, which encompasses a
whole range of social equalities including secular equalities. This
Constitution is one of the finest documents in the long history of that
global revolution that first began in France two hundred years ago and
which too is yet very far from finished. I don't want to at all minimize
the great value of this collective possession of ours. But I would submit
to you that if we really want to understand the actual character of the
Indian state we should equally examine the actual practices of the Police,
the Provincial Constabularies, the other agencies of state as they operate
on the ground. That is where the limits of our democracy and our secularism
are the most palpable. These routinised violences of the state agencies,
including their routinised participation in communal violence, their
methodical neglect to investigate or punish communal violence, are not
merely epiphenomenal. So substantial a part of the daily conduct of
agencies of the state can never be epiphenomenal. One cannot take comfort
in supposing that all this is a consequence of the degeneration of the
political elite and the professional politicians. In part, it is a
consequence of such degenerations. But no state, certainly no state based
on electoral democracy, is ever so very epiphenomenal, so very much outside
and above civil society, that its widespread personnel, which has to live
within that very civil society, can go on participating in certain kinds of
violences which have no substantial sanction within that society.

When the police oppresses the poor peasants and the landless peasantry, we
know that the whole power and system of property-property in general-stands
behind that police. When we think of the routinised violences that are
perpetrated against women in society, we know that it is not a matter, in
the final analysis, of this or that individual but of the patriarchal
structure as a whole. We know, or at least most of us contrive to know, the
same about caste violences. And we know that agencies of state are fully
implicated in these other kinds of violences precisely because they have a
wide social sanction. Might it not be the case that communal violence also
has a much wider social sanction behind it than we have heretofore
acknowledged? That is the question that undercuts the common, comforting
belief that most of our society is really tolerant and secular, or that
communal violence is simply a sectional and marginal pathology. So, when I
use the phrase "cultures of cruelty" I mean something more than
professional politicians, more than agencies of the state on the ground,
more even than organised communalism; I mean a much wider web of social
sanctions in which one kind of violence can be tolerated all the more
because many other kinds of violence are tolerated anyway. Dowry deaths do
facilitate the burning of women out of communal motivations, and, together,
these two kinds of violences do contribute to the making of a more
generalised culture of cruelty as well as a more generalized ethical
numbness toward cruelty as such. And when I speak of "rightwing politics
and the cultures of cruelty," I undoubtedly refer to the culture of
cruelties that the Hindutva right-wing is creating, methodically and in
cold blood, in pursuit of what strikes me as a fascist project. I do mean
that such cultures of cruelty have been a punctual feature of the politics
of the far right throughout its history, everywhere in the world. I do mean
to draw your attention to the great discrepancy between the spiritualist
claim of defending Hindu piety, Hindu tradition, Hindu ethos, and the
creation in practice of a brutish and brutalising culture as is symbolised
by the average member of the Bajrang Dal, who functions as a storm trooper
of the Hindutva purification over which our Prime Minister, the liberal Mr.
Vajpayee, is pleased to preside. But I also mean something else, that the
hindutva brigade is not only an agent and a perpetrator, it is also a
beneficiary. If its acts upon the wider culture so as to brutalize it, the
pre-existing cultures of cruelty also serve to sustain its projects.

That much, I thought, I should say. But what about our `secular
nationalism'? This is my own tradition; it has had a powerful presence and
on the whole a positive role in our society; it is what prevented India, in
the midst of the communal holocaust that accompanied the Partition, from
becoming a Hindu Rashtra and gave to the country a democratic, secular
constitution. You would be misunderstanding me completely if you were to
conclude that I wish to downplay or disregard this tradition. It is mine;
it has made me what I am. It is yours, and it has made you what you are.
Mr. Ved Gupta is no longer among us, but if I understand the meaning of his
life correctly he too would have been proud to belong to it. And yet,
because this tradition is ours-this tradition that tries so very hard to
live up to the ethical claims of a modern rationality-we have the
birthright to criticize it, as severely as we wish, in the spirit of that
Enlightenment which has taught us that the exercise of one's own critical
faculty is not only a right but a duty, without the performance of which
the good society cannot come into being. So, let me also say the following,
in the spirit of a self-criticism, more or less.

When I emphasized that secularism does not arise spontaneously out of the
traditional society but is a modern civic virtue that had come into being
as part of a project to revolutionize society as a whole, I wanted to draw
your attention to quite a few things. One is that modern politics in India
began not as an exercise in citizenship, since no one can be the citizen of
a colony, but as so many attempts to organise pressure groups that could
negotiate with the colonial authority, and, inevitably, these pressure
groups were organized around the fault lines that existed already in
society, so that factors of religion, caste and community were paramount in
the organisation of such groups. For all its attempts and claims to become
secular, even the Indian National Congress, when it arose, was itself
constantly attempting to reach some sort of a balance among elites of
various religious entities and denominational communities. I would even
suggest to you that diverse individuals and groups subscribing to a
particular religion or sect came to be defined as coherent communities and
political entities precisely because groups of elites needed to claim that
they represented such communities and entities. In the colonial society,
community was where citizenship was not. The very idea that we now take as
self-evident, that Hindus and Muslims and Christians respectively
constitute homogeneous and politically meaningful communities, is the
product of that fantastic moment when the representors had to invent the
represented. In that semi-modernizing society of non-citizenship,
nationalism in its originary moment could only be cultural nationalism
because it was politically too weak to claim an identity as a politically
formed nation. Please contemplate the fact that the claim that we are a
nation is, in our history, much older than the claim that we are a secular
nation or that this nationhood in some fundamental way cannot be born
without the abolition of colonial autocracy. Even the most secular of our
nationalists continued to think of India as a primordial nation
civilizationally defined, rather than a modern nation that was the product
of the anti-colonial movement itself and an entity that arose out of the
crucible of 15 August 1947. In such conceptions, the nation was already an
embodiment of a supposed shared culture and not a product of common
citizenship or juridic equality. Our nationalism was cultural well before
it was political or civic or secular. In this ambience, the temptations of
blood and belonging, of spiritual essence, of racial or religious
particularity, of revivalism and purification were particularly strong.
Religious identity was built into our canonical reform movements and into
even the prehistory of Indian nationalism, as these evolved not only in
Bengal but also elsewhere, as for example among the Muslim reformists of
North India, not to speak of the Muslim political elite as a whole,
throughout the history of that anti-colonial and communally marked
nationalism, as much those who participated in the separatist movement as
the ones who were absorbed in Congress nationalism; Jinnah and Azad, after
all, equally insisted on being Muslims and leaders of Muslims, the only
complication being that they offered different recipes for the Muslims whom
both claimed to represent.

All of this was very much complicated by the caste and class character of
these reformers, revivalists and cultural nationalists. This caste and
class origin necessarily required a misrecognition of the actual character
of the people who were now said to be a nation. The Orientalist scholarship
which gave us the images of Aryan origin, Vedic purity and Muslim tyranny
was in fact a joint product of some bookish Europeans and these upper caste
gentlemen, with equal though different investment in such images. So, the
nostalgia that arose out of such scholarship had peculiarly strong caste
flavour; the India of the past was the past of these upper castes. The
revivalisms were not even national in any substantive fashion; as Gramsci
immortally remarked, the word "nation" means nothing if it does not mean
"the people." For those gentlemen-reformers, however, `the people' remained
a rhetorical category, always to be invoked but never granted any
autonomous space in those projects of reform, while the reforms that were
proposed or undertaken in the name of the nation always remained confined
to their own class, caste and/or community. So, the line between reform and
revivalism remained forever blurred, and the revivalisms as such were just
so many narcissisms of those upper castes that could no longer rule in
reality and therefore ruled only in the imagination, not in the present but
in a past that was somehow to be transformed into a future. The only thing
that guaranteed the security of this phantasy was the fact of property,
which they still commanded, as they had commanded in the past; here, then,
was the real link between their past and their present, which they hoped to
continue into the future. Colonial government was acceptable because it was
now the real guarantor of that property. Those early heroes of ours were
conservative, socially and politically, and not even notably anti-colonial.
In this milieu, then, our nationalism was born.

I shall take up this story again in a moment. What I have just said prompts
me to offer you two observations, however. One is the reminder of what
Hegel once said, namely that only the slave can understand the whole of
society because he must understand himself as well as the conditions of his
exploitation, and hence his master; whereas the master can rest his laurels
on understanding merely himself and the terms on which he can exploit his
slave. It is in this specific sense that the consciousness of the
subjugated is always superior to the conscious of the rulers. Which leads
me to my second observation, namely that in the multiplicity of our reform
movements, it was only the reform movements of the oppressed castes, and
the efforts of some valiant women, that were substantially free of those
kinds of revivalisms and had some fundamental understanding of the social
whole, and therefore of the "nation" conceived as "the people," because the
overwhelming majority of "the people" were neither upper class nor upper
caste. It is no wonder that among all the reformists Periyar stands out as
an avowed atheist and Ambedkar ultimately undertook a formal religious
conversion not as merely a personal act but as a public and participatory
act, living his conversion not as a personal salvation but as militant
repudiation of caste society and as an invitation to mass repudiation of
the same. At this dangerous turn in our history when Mr. Vajpayee
recommends a national debate on the issue of conversions, I would suggest
to you that, in the larger historical sense, there is something that
connects the spirit of our Constitution, which calls upon us to abolish
caste and denomination as politically meaningful categories, and the spirit
in which Ambedkar, the principal architect of that Constitution, undertook
his own departure from caste society and led a mass conversation out of
that kind of slavery. In this moment, when a spiral of fire that burns
crosses as well as Christians is flaming across the country, it is
important for us to say that there have been in our history, in the remote
past and in the recent past, religious conversions-out of caste society,
and sometimes out of religion altogether-that we must take up as so many
badges of revolt and honour.

But I was talking about that originary moment when revivalism and a
nostalgia for a golden age in the past was rampant among impressive
sections of the intelligentsia that defined the first rudiments of cultural
nationalism. Precisely at the time, during the closing years of the
nineteenth century and the opening ones of the twentieth, when
representatives of Indian economic nationalism were formulating analytic
procedures for explaining colonial exploitations, some of the most
influential figures in the literary and cultural fields were deeply
attracted by a cultural nationalism that was distinctly revivalist in
character and religiously exclusivist by implication. Neither Bankim nor
Aurobindo, neither the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal nor the Shivaji cult
propagated in Maharashtra by such icons of Indian nationalism as Tilak
himself, were quite untainted by that kind of revivalist fervour. Indeed,
so powerful was the revivalist culture of the upper castes that when
anti-Brahminical movements surfaced in Maharashtra, whether under Phule or
Ambedkar, it was the extremity of the backlash of the upper castes in that
region that gave us the RSS in the first place, with all its mythologies of
blood and belief.

This is not to say that either Tilak or Aurobindo would be quite approving
of what the Hindutva of our own day is and does. And yet there is enough
there for a common sense to prevail today among sections of the urban upper
castes and middle classes, in various parts of India, especially the
Northern and the Western, to be persuaded that the social vision and
cultural idiom of this modernday Hindutva is descended from that general
ambience of our `renaissance' and `awakening'.

Indeed the potentials of that kind of revivalism were so pernicious that
Tagore was to warn at length, already in the second decade of this century,
that there was only a short step from revivalist zealotry to communal
frenzy. In two of his great novels, Gora and Home and the World, whatever
other shortcomings those novels might also have, Tagore was to portray with
great sensitivity and acumen how revivalist politics and communal closures
may be particularly tempting to the socially insecure and the upwardly
mobile.

That, then, is a crucial point: the sheer persistence of Brahminical
revivalisms at the very heart of what were expected to be structures of our
modernity and which never did gave us any kind of modernity, precisely
because of the extensive compromises they made with colonial
representations of Indian history and because of their interest in
representing their caste cultures as our `national culture'. Hindutva has
derived much comfort from those revivalisms, but considerable sections of
what we call our secular nationalism have never been quite free of that
kind of rhetoric, so much so that Hind Swaraj is of course a major document
of that nostalgia fantasy of the past but even Nehru's Discovery of India
tends sometimes to rehearse precisely those themes. There have of course
been many valiant individuals, even some groupings, for whom secularism has
been a primary value but, for the most part, what passes for secularism in
India is in fact a tolerant kind of pluralism, which has tended to in fact
accentuate the role of religion in public life rather than bring about its
decline, and the Iftar party in which the Muslim Mullah can embrace Madan
Lal Khurana is of course one of the more humorous, one of the more bizarre
expressions of this professed pluralism. In this larger context, then, one
can say that it is only on the Left that a whole political formation has
arisen for which secularism is a fundamental premise.

So we have been caught between the rising tide of revivalist communalism on
the Right, a tolerant kind of pluralism on the part of a Centre that has
been collapsing and fragmenting for a couple of decades now, and a Left
that has been a substantial presence but still a minority current in
society as a whole, the only redeeming feature being that the Left commands
a moral authority and a degree of social consent very much exceeding its
numerical strength. it is in this context that the Sangh undertakes wave
after wave of its offensives and dreams of completing its revolution of the
Far Right within the foreseeable future. It creates a widespread culture of
cruelty so that the violences it desires may be carried out not only by its
actual members but also by the mobs and the vagrants whom it incites,
assembles and motivates.

I said a bit earlier that a common trait among movements of this kind is
that they offer an anti-materialist conception of revolution, an
anti-liberal conception of nationalism, and an anti-rationalist critique of
Modernity. Let me briefly explain what I mean. Historically, these
movements arose in response to the emergence of mass working class parties
which offered a materialist conception of revolution, based on an
understanding that the real history was the history of material production
and therefore of the classes that were engaged in those productions and
their benefits. This conception posited the primacy of class conflict, with
a vision of multi-cultural and multi-religious unities of the working
class, and a revolutionary restructuring of society based on economic and
social justice and the collective management of the production of wealth by
an association of the direct producers. In this conception, the state was
to be reduced eventually to a purely managerial function, and nations
themselves amalgamated into a universalist equality. Movements of integral
nationalism, and then of fascism, arose in direct opposition to each and
all of these propositions. Real history, they said, is the history of
culture, belief, blood, race, language and what I have called primordial
intimacy. The true revolution was the one that affirmed and purified this
fundamental nature and ethos of the nation, and for this purification one
needed not a weakened but a vastly strengthened militarised nation. What
was primary was not the domains of production or the conflict of classes
but the domains of subjectivity and identity, be they racial or religious
or linguistic, and the real clash was the civilizational clash of these
identities. The real arena of struggle was not the material but the
spiritual; and the real motivating force was not reason or even ethics but
the spirit, the imagination, the myth.

And this kind of nationalism was an anti-liberal nationalism in a very
specific sense. The economic project of liberalism, the project of private
property and the market and the accumulation of capital, were accepted and
posited against the collectivist economic project of the working class
parties. But the political project of liberalism-based as it was on
individual freedoms, broad tolerance of religious and cultural diversities,
and representative forms of government-was rejected as inadequate for the
tasks of radical re-structuring of the nation which required not individual
freedom but mass consent to a homogeneous culture and the superiority of
one religion over another, one race over another. It is significant that
the Jews who came in for such a special treatment by the Nazis were
perceived as aliens on both counts, race as well as religion. Against
parliamentary democracy, these movements upheld authoritarian command
structures, a cult of the leader, a cult of violence as a necessary means
of purification, a virtually paramilitary organization of their cadres and
an extra-parliamentary structure of the core leadership group, a culture of
obedience among the cadres and of spectacular mobilizations of the masses.
The March on Rome, the burning of the Reichstag, the shilanyas, the rath
yatras, the spectacular destruction of Mir Baqi's antique little
mosque-these are events in a single chain. And it is sobering to recall
that the shakhas of the RSS in India were consciously patterned after the
fascist training centres in Italy, after Moonje had visited those centres
and had chatted with Mussolini.

Likewise the anti-rationalist critique of Modernity! It is significant that
this critique of Modernity was also very partial. It does not include, for
example, a repudiation of the market, which has been so central an
institution of capitalist forms of rationality and modernity. Nor does it
repudiate the sciences and technologies upon which modern industrial
production is based, and which are so much the source of capitalist wealth.
Rather, it rejects what Eric Hobsbawm has felicitously called `the
Enlightenment Left': the values of non-racial and non-denominational
equality, the fraternity of the culturally diverse, the supremacy of Reason
over Faith, the belief in freedom and progress, the belief that the
exercise of critical reason, beyond all tradition or convention or
institution, is the fundamental civic virtue without which other civic
virtues cannot be sustained. As educators in pursuit of a secular democracy
and a Left-of-Centre polity, we understand and uphold these values of the
Enlightenment Left. The radical Right also understands them, but fears them
and repudiates them. Thus it is that we dedicate ourselves to the creation
of a culture of civility, and they to a culture of cruelty. That,
ultimately, is at the heart of all our disputes.

The assault on our institutions of education and research is a central
element in this project, because these institutions are central in the
reproduction of civil society. As Marx once put it:

In considering such transformations, a distinction must always be made
between the material transformation of the economic conditions of
production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science,
and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophic-in short,
ideological forms in which men become conscious of their conflict and fight
it out.

The battle over ideology and consciousness-the battle over all their forms,
be they political, or aesthetic, or religious, or philosophic-is thus the
central battle, because it is here, in these domains, not simply at the
point of production, that human beings actually "fight it out." We of
course know that, but they also know it. If they are to re-make India in
their own image, they must first win the hearts and minds of our children.
It is in this battle that we must engage, because without democratic
teachers there shall be no democratic India.

Notes

1. This is the text of a lecture delivered at Delhi University on 11
February 1999 in memory of Ved Gupta, one of the key founders of the
Democratic Teachers Federation (DTF). The endnotes have been added later.

2. It can be plausibly argued that whereas the other organizations of the
Sangh parivar, notably Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal as
well as the more recently formed Hindu Jagran Munch (HJM), have used the
umbrella of the BJP government, both at the Centre as well as in such
states as U. P. and Gujarat, to act on a very broad front ranging from
expedited pace of preparation for building the temple at Ayodhya to the
attacks on minorities, the cultural project of these governments, at the
Centre and in the States, has been focussed on trying to restructure the
educational and research institutions, as is indicated in the attempts to
revise textbooks, revamp such institutions as the Indian Council for
Historical Research (ICHR), and Hinduise educational practice by
introducing the singing of the Bande Matram and the Sarasvati Vandana in
educational institutions. Culture, in the broadest sense, has been a
primary target area for the RSS as a whole throughout this period of
governmental power.

3. A number of the historians of European fascism, notably Sternhill, have
traced the origins of the fascist ideology to the anti-materialist and
Romantic critique of Marxism by such figures as Georges Sorel, Charles
Maurras and the revolutionary syndicalists toward the end of the 19th
century and in the beginning of the 20th century. They have also argued
that Mussolini, himself a professed socialist in his early career, was
nevertheless deeply inspired by this tradition of hysterical nationalism
and the cult of violence, and that he forged what we now know as the
classical Italian fascism directly in opposition to the rise of Leninism as
the dominant trend in international socialism. See, for instance, Zeev
Sternhill (with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri), The Birth of Fascist
Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, Princeton
University Press, 1994 (original French, 1989). It may be worth mentioning
that Ali Shariati, the principal theoretician of the `leftwing' of the
Islamic Revolution in Iran, was deeply impressed by the writings of Charles
Maurras, just as Moonje was directly inspired by Mussolini himself.

4. The National Front in France and the National Alliance in Italy are only
two of the major rightwing groups in Western Europe whose roots in
classical fascism of the inter-war years are well known. The Italian
variant shall bear a more detailed comment. For forty years, Gianfranco
Fini, the leader of this group, happily called himself a fascist or
`neo-fascist'. Then, as his group suddenly emerged as the major coalition
partner in the government of Silvio Berlusconi after the Italian elections
of 1994, he fleetingly claimed that he was not a fascist but a
`post-fascist' but then, recognizing that the word `fascist' has fallen
into terrible disrepute, he re-named the group as `National Alliance'.
Unlike the fascists of the 1920s and '30s, those of today usually adopt a
different name, so as to conceal their true identity. However, their
origins in fascist ideology are widely recognized. See, for example, Glynn
Ford, Fascist Europe: The Rise of Racism and Xenophobia, London, Pluto
Press, 1992; or the Special Issue of International Socialist entitled
"Euro-Fascism: What makes it Tick?", no 60, Autumn 1993. Dozens of such
analyses are available.

5. This is particularly true of the Croatian leaders and the Serb militias,
whose origins date back to the pro-fascist organizations that had fought
the civil war against Tito's partisans. However, the political origins of
the relatively more benign rulers of Slovenia can also be traced back to
those same anti-partisan formations.

6. The origins of India's anti-colonial movement are of course much older
but it became a mass movement only with the Rawlatt Satyagrah and the
Non-Cooperation Movements of the 1919-22 period. Similarly, peasants' and
workers' agitations of the modern type had begun already in the 19th
century, but the emergence of a mass workers' movement can be traced
back-in terms of convenient dates-to the founding of the All India Trade
Union Congress in 1920 and the rise of several communist groups as well as
Workers' and Peasants Parties (WPP) over the next few years, reaching a
high level of working class militancy during 1927-29 period. RSS arose
directly in response-a rightwing obscurantist response-to these
developments.

7. Aijaz Ahmad, "Structure and Ideology in Italian Fascism" in Lineages of
the Present, Delhi, Tulika, 1996.

8. Broadly speaking, we could offer the following schema. 1) The end of the
Second World War witnessed an enormous upsurge of anti-colonial movements
and a massive wave of decolonisation across Asia and Africa. Great
expectations were attached to the rise of the national-bourgeois state as
symbolized, for example, in the Bandung Conference and the emergence of the
Non-Aligned Movement. 2) The passing of those hopes occurred at different
times in different countries, but, on the whole, it was during the ten
years between 1965 and 1975 that this type of state reached its crisis, as
symbolised, for example, by the defeat of Egypt and Syria in 1967 and the
imposition of the Emergency in India some years later. 3) Since the
mid-70s-since the 1973 coup in Chile, let us say-there has been little
evidence that any national bourgeoisie is seriously interested in defending
national independence against imperialist pressures, and the disillusion
has become particularly strong over the past decade. See, for a fuller
statement of this position, Aijaz Ahmad, "Introduction: Literature Among
the Signs of Our Times," in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures,
London, Verso, 1992.

9. This critique became particularly influential with the rise to dominance
of the anti-communist, postmodern theorists in the wake of the aborted
Paris uprisings of 1968. That this dramatic shift in philosophical thinking
was led by French intellectuals is not a coincidence. Nor is it a
coincidence that this critique, which formalised the dashing of
revolutionary hopes, became dominant in the advanced capitalist countries
precisely during the years when the newly independent countries of Asia and
Africa witnessed the dashing of hopes associated with decolonisation. The
early 70s are the years of a triple crisis across the world: the crisis of
the national-bourgeois state in the periphery of the capitalist system; the
onset of stagnation in the capitalist centres, in the wake of a long wave
of prosperity since the late 1940s; and a similar onset of stagnation in
the COMECON countries, coupled with their failure to make a transition from
extensive industrialisation to intensive industrialisation based on the
more up-to-date technologies. This coincidence of various crises is central
to the rise of anti-materialist and anti-revolutionary irrationalisms
during this period.

10. The characterisation of nationalism as "a derivative discourse"-derived
from colonialism itself-is of course the major conceptual contribution of
Partha Chatterjee, the most influential of the subalternist theorists,
alongside Ranajit Guha. See, in particular, the chapter on Nehru in his
Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, Delhi,
Oxford University Press, 1986. The attack on Nehru's emphasis on industrial
modernization within a framework of central planning converges, in not
altogether agreeable ways, with similar attacks coming from the Right,
including the international agencies advocating "liberalisation."
Chatterjee seems much perturbed by planning and "modernity" but not much by
the market itself. His identification of Gandhi with "tradition" and of
Nehru with "modernity" only repeats the conventional wisdom of Indian
social science and paves the way for subalternism's later turn toward a
full-scale anti-rationalist, indigenist postmodernism.

11. The historic premises of the Indian state as it arose after
decolonisation, with its twin emphases on secular democracy and economic
nationalism, were fully under siege by the mid-90s, as the country got
overwhelmed by the IMF-inspired "liberalisation" and the RSS-inspired
"Hindu nationalism." It was in the midst of this historic shift toward the
Far Right that Partha Chatterjee published his well-known essay "Secularism
and Toleration" (Economic and Political Weekly, XXIX, 28) which questioned
the very idea of secularism, a civic virtue enshrined in the Indian
Constitution, and affiliated the author explicitly with Ashish Nandy who
had by then had a rather extensive red-baiting career. In deed, Chatterjee
was to state that his own essay was a mere continuation of the argument
begun by Nandy in his "The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of
Religious Tolerance," in Veena Das (ed.) Mirrors of Violence: Communities,
Riots and Survivors in South Asia, New Delhi, Oxford University Press,
1992. Subalternism has had a curious career, starting with invocations of
Gramsci and finally coming into its own as an accomplice of the
anti-communist Right.